The story of Emmett Till

BY ALEXIS HAWK

(Alexis Hawk was in Mr. Turner's Communication Arts class during the 2006-2007 school year.)
On August 27, 1955, in Money,Mississippi Emmett Till,a fourteen-year-old black male, was beaten, had his eye cut out, and then was shot to death by two white older men named Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. (The Murder of Emmett Till, http://WWW.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/emmett.HTML)
Two days earlier Emmett had come from Chicago,Illinois, to Money, Mississippi with his cousin, Curtis Jones, to visit his uncle, Mose Wright. He was hanging out with some other kids from around town out side of a store and pulled out a picture of a white girl that he was friends with from Chicago and started bragging that is was his girlfriend. One of the boys pointed out that there was a white girl in the store running the cash reg ester and that he bet Emmett wouldn't go in there and talk to her. Emmett took the boys' bet and went into the store to buy some candy on his way out he whistled and/or said "bye baby" to the girl running the cash reg ester, her name was Carolyn Bryant and she was the wife of the store owner Roy Bryant. (The Lynching of Emmett Till, http://www.heroism.org/class/1950/heroes/till.HTML)
Emmett being from the south was unaware of the Jim Crow Laws which applied in the north. Some of the Jim Crow Laws are, A Black male could not offer his hand to shake hands with a white male because it implied being socially equal, A Black man could not offer his hand or any other body part to a white woman because he risked being accused of rape., Black and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them., If a black person ride in a car driven by a white person the black person sat in the back seat or the back of a trunk, Never assert or intimate that a white person is lying.Never impute dishonorable intentions to a white person. Never suggest that a white person is from an inferior class., Never curse a white person., Never laugh derisively at a white person, Never comment upon the appearance of a white female. So according to the Jim Crow Laws, what Emmet did to Carolyn Bryant was completely unacceptable.
(The Jim Crow Laws, http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.HTML)
Two days after Emmett Till when into that store and talk/whistled at Carolyn Bryant. He was taken from his uncle Mose's house in the middle of the night and shot and beaten to death by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. He was found 3 days later in the Tallahatchie River by the law enforcement of Mississippi, One of hes eyes had been cut out and he had a bullet hole in his head. They were able to figure out that it was Emmett because he was wearing a ring with his inital on it, that Mose Wright saw and he was the one who identified him. But because it was so hard to recognize the corpse his mother Mamie Bradley wanted to inspect it to confirm it was really Emmett. (the Murder of Emmett Till)
Mamie Emmett's mother had Emmett's body shipped back to Chicago. When they had the funeral Mamie made sure that it was open-casket She wanted to let everyone see what Roy and J.W. did to her son.(The Murder of Emmett Till)
On September 19, 1955 in Summer,Mississippi the trail for Emmett Till's murder was held. The jury was all white men. Roy and J.W. said that the body found in the Tallahatchie river was not Emmett Till and that and that Mamie had dug up a body an just said it was Emmett till's. Roy and J.W. did admit to take Emmett from his uncles house but said they had let him go. Roy Bryant and J.W. milam's attorney told the jury that their Fathers would turn around in their graves if they were to hear that white men were accused of killing a black man. This trial lasted five days and with in thougths five days the jury found Roy and J.W. not guilty because they didn't have enough prove that the body found in the lake was Emmett. The case has been reopened a couple of years ago and is now being investigated even though J.W. and Roy are both dead. The reason it has been reopened is because the government thinks that their was more then just two people there that night when Emmett Till was killed. the FBI dug up Emmett Tills body and put it through an autopsy. they are trying to see if there is anything else that can be done about the murder of Emmett Till. (http://afroamhistory.about.com/od/emmetttill/a/emmetttill_2.HTML)
The Murder of Emmett Till is just an example of the many injustices that happen during the time of the Civil Rights Movement and how unfair things were for the black people back then just because of the color of their skin.